Nah, I think you guys who are disagreeing with kartal are missing his point but at the same time, that's IMO the flaw with all these things: we're casual people trying to assume the mantle of experts or linguists...or for the linguists, you're experts trying to fit your square mindset into the round holes of casuals.
To play word games a bit, it's not diction or grammar or lack of standards. In the big picture, kartal is talking about culture and you guys who are disagreeing with kartal, if I interpret your posts correctly, are talking about standards and hence your disagreement stems from almost the false impression that kartal is meaning to push the necessity for a lack of standards when kartal is really all about pointing that the standards themselves are flawed and haven't really been respected by cultures for a long time.
It's like the case with the history of raison d'etat:
Before Machiavelli, writers on political philosophy had been generally agreed on the virtues and methods appropriate to nations and those who would make them great. Although the ideas were more rooted in classical Greek philosophy, they were identified mostly with Cicero, who had Romanized them and made them widely available in his handbook for rulers, On Moral Obligations. This was one of the first books to be printed in Christendom, and Erasmus had a pocket-sized edition created so the would-be virtuoso would never be caught short.
Then in 1519, Niccolo Machiavelli landed a cannonball in European political thought, one which no subsequent writer could ignore. His crime was to tell things how they were by pointing out the hypocrisy of rulers who purported to rule in the name of virtue and religion, but in fact abided by neither.
Really both sides are correct. It's true that grammar has often been manipulated by the elites to put down others. Heck, it's why we even have the negative fallacies of political correctness and single issue voters in the first place. Really the standards are there but they're there to be broken and have been broken because the plate, the foundation of language was never based upon any standards until the majority of people within a culture established it upon themselves.
At the same time, trial and error does yield natural selection so the standards do work but they are not...how should I put it... irrevocable rules. Don't disrespect them but don't be afraid to break them either and don't put them in a pedestal either is my opinion.
Even zridling's example is flawed. It really depends on the medium. We can read John Milton clearly because he abided an effective standard for his medium but this isn't set in stone. For example, while I'm not a grammar nazi, it's still true that the reason why many can't understand me clearly and feel my words are tl;dr is precisely because I follow the standards of grammar when I should be following the standards of the blogging and microblogging crowd and instead shave off grammar in favor of the effective way of using tons of bullets, 140 character words, little paragraphs in my way of communicating in this medium. Yet at the same time, it's still true that some can understand and will want to read my post still despite this, because I do follow certain things under the grammatical standard. And while I'm not a proponent of the Elements of Style, I do feel it is a useful book that have helped many in communicating but yes, if it has brought unintended consequences, it should be criticized too but then, the structure of criticism is to improve things not prove each other wrong hence why we should remind each other here of what it is really that we want to improve and not disagree for the sake of disagreeing; because we are non-experts and hence we are prone to using/mis-using different lexicons to describe things so it is of utmost importance for us to be reminded that it is necessary to "see through the other person's point" first before we jump to conclusions on what we think their opinions entail.
Edit: I'd link to Politics in the English Language by Orwell but we're talking about grammar here.
